The world is constantly asking women to talk more, to work even harder to be heard. Where is the movement for men to, simply, listen?

A couple weeks ago, while we were working on this article, a female chef mentioned in passing that it was only a matter of time before Batali’s name would soon follow Besh’s. Like many of the men whose abuses of power have been revealed to the public in recent months, Batali’s reputation was known to many in the food world. Laws of libel being what they are, we obviously couldn’t print that, nor did the chef want us to. “It’s not my story to tell,” she said.

I've been hearing variations on that phrase—“It wasn't my story to tell”—a lot lately. Though it's intended as a way of respecting the people who've been harassed, abused, and put upon, it has started to irk me. Yes, legally, it cannot be your story to tell to the media, especially if it wasn’t witnessed firsthand. But does the reporting of an abuse have to, by necessity, mirror the imbalance of power that led to it in the first place? As if it's not enough to endure the discrimination, the onus is on women to unearth the pain and bring it to the surface, months or years or even decades later.

And of course, after the Besh story came out, this is just what happened. All of a sudden, the media began asking women cooks and chefs to speak. As the chef Amanda Cohen summed it up in her searing piece for Esquire last month, “For the past two weeks, my Twitter feed and email inbox have been filled to overflowing with food journalists begging me to Come Forward With My Story, demanding that I Make a Statement, encouraging me to Speak Out.”

As I waited for some critical mass of claims against Batali to accrue—whatever number of incidents whichever publication deemed sufficient to merit exposure—I felt kind of sick. Unlike with the Weinstein or Charlie Rose accusations, I was no longer a bystander to a cultural moment; I felt, in a way, complicit in it. The fact that women in the restaurant industry face indignities and discrimination has been, for as long as I've been writing about food, so embedded in the culture that speaking about it publicly seemed, as Molly Ringwald wrote, like "talking about the weather." Now, finally, at this long overdue moment, the sordid reality of the restaurant culture I've covered for almost a decade became itself the story. But my colleagues and I struggled with what to say—and who should say it.

As a magazine that’s been around since 1955, Bon Appétit has long defined itself by our print readership. We have a high retention rate, which means that many of our readers—like, for instance, my mom and all her friends—have been subscribers for decades. These readers come to us because they want recipes that look delicious that they can cook at home. We sometimes forget how socially conservative some of these readers are, which is not even to mention the outright racist letters we got after publishing this piece. Our online demographic is much different, and yet they, too, have a vocal squad reminding us to "Stick to food!" when we publish articles like this one.

And so here we are, no longer simply a magazine but a hydra-like creature in near-constant engagement with various audiences via YouTube, social media, etc., participating in the 24-hour news cycle when it comes to a new Frappucino flavor or the acquisition of Whole Foods. Our platform, frequency, and voice has evolved. And as editors, we’re trying to figure out how to evolve with it. We are a magazine that has, throughout the decades, championed and lionized white male chefs, including Besh and Batali. We've had a particular affinity for Ken Friedman's restaurants, having named Tosca our #4 Best New Restaurant in America in 2014. What do we do, now that we know what we know? Does our silence on these guys' patterns of wrongdoings become complicitous? But we're not a news site. We're a cooking magazine: What do we have to say?

We’re not the only “legacy” food brand to face this quandary. Food & Wine jumped into the conversation with more speed and agility than we did, soliciting responses from chefs on the subject of workplace harassment. I wished that we had been quicker to position ourselves as a site that was encouraging these types of discussions, even if the downside of being fast is that what you put up will not be perfect. (A sanctimonious essay from a white male chef’s perspective wouldn’t have been my first choice to kick off the series.)

Is it better to say something, even if it’s not exactly the right thing? That’s something I’ve always found men to be particularly good at, and the present moment is no exception. Male chefs seem to have as much to say as always. Tom Colicchio has styled himself as the hashtag-Resistance of the food world, and the man who epitomizes the machismo-industrial-complex—Anthony Bourdain—seems oblivious to the irony of his tweets.

Last year at BA, after we published a now-deleted video that was rightfully pilloried by the entire Internet for its high-gloss cultural appropriation, we began a lot of still-ongoing conversations about how we can be part of the solution to a problem that we had a hand in creating. A lot of the decisions we’ve made have been quiet ones, and I honestly don’t know how effective they’ve been. There are many chefs deserving of profiles on bonappetit.com, and we have chosen to feature primarily women, many of them people of color, first and foremost because they’re extremely talented people we think our readers need to know about. We can hope that for a chef like Daniela Moreira or Courtney Storer, BA press might be the external affirmation that convinces an investor to support a future project of her own, or it might add her name to future coverage of the restaurant where she works, alongside the male owners.

On the flipside, when we've had interactions with chefs (in the Test Kitchen, at events, or while reporting stories) who've treated writers in a way that was, in the insufficient language we use to describe these things, “creepy,” we’ve quietly chosen not to cover them in the future.

When Andrew Knowlton and I compile the Hot 10, our annual list of the best new restaurants in America, we factor in not just the food and the vibe but whether or not the chefs and owners seem like shitheads. It’s not a perfect science, but at least it weeded out some assholes.

In all these cases, we’ve tested out the theory that by propping up worthy people, we could balance things out. But it has never felt like enough.

I inherited a particular personality trait from my dad, which is that I don't like to talk unless I feel that I have something worthwhile to say. (In writing, however, I'm less reticent.) As I went from being a critic at a city magazine churning out reviews with my headphones on all day to being an editor at Bon Appétit participating in back-to-back meetings, I started getting the same feedback in my annual reviews: You need to talk more.

I've always resented this advice. Couldn't the people dominating the meeting just...talk less?

The world—men and Sheryl Sandberg included—is constantly asking women to talk more, to Lean In, to work even harder to be heard. Where is the movement for men to Lean Out? As a man, you can sit away from the table. Maybe don’t talk in every meeting. And guess what? During a time when the things that women have been saying to each other for decades are finally being listened to by a wider audience, you don’t actually have to add your own commentary or your co-sign.

Male chefs have come forward out of sympathy, true compassion, and, in some cases, shame about their complicity in creating our misogynistic restaurant culture. But unless you're a chef who's actually getting out in front of the accusations and coming forward to admit your guilt before you're fielding calls from fact-checkers, maybe just keep your thoughts to yourself? Even the public apologies have become yet more platforms for the voices of the men in power to heard, to have if not the final word then at least a few more. You can change your behavior without writing an editorial about it.

Of course, these small gestures of silence and of listening will not be enough. We will all still be here tomorrow, asking women to talk more. It's their story to tell. I just wish it didn't have to be.